Flux Health Forum

Bellabee device

PEMF Basics
#1

@Bob or others in the technical Know…

There is a new device being marketed to neurofeedback practitioners and their clients called the Bellabee. It uses a headband and a connection to a cell phone app and has been getting quite positive reviews from its users.

In some way, it sounds like a PEMF device to me - maybe more like ICES devices in its delivery? I’ve asked about what it is if not PEMF and got this answer:

Blockquote PEMF- devices are usually specified to be used on the body by laying on a mat or wrapping a device around extremities, helping to recondition the cells of the body and using magnet resonance theory. The Bellabee is a device that specifically targets the Brain through electromagnetic pulses. A voltage transformer also works through the use of elektromagnetic pulses, where the change of the voltage in a coil induces an electromagnetic field which in turn causes an electromagnetic impulse to be created in a different electromagnetic coil that is placed on the same iron core. The Bellabee with the app is working on the same principle, except that it does not have the second coil to create a specific voltage. The focus with the Bellabee is to create a certain frequency to stimulate the brain to get into coherence through resonance of the brain circuits with frequencies that are known to be frequencies that are associated to healthy states of the brain, that science has been able to identify by analysing brains during specific states of mind as in meditation. I hope this makes sense.

It kind of makes sense to me based on coils and induced fields, but it feels all wrapped around with the “propoer jargon”. I assume even ICES and probably other PEMF-type devices are relying on a certain entrainment/frequency-following effect of the body~brain, so I’m not clear on what might be different here.

Does this explanation make sense to you? Or what question(s) might I pose to them to separate what they are doing vs other systems?

Thanks for any insight you can provide on this!

#2

honestly… this sounds to me like pseudo-technical jargon. No one who understands the physics would describe it that way, and the biology they state has no basis in experimental observation.

I have been to this rodeo many dozens of times, so I would anticipate that if you really dig down, to the real truth, you would find just a marketer creating gibberish from a crude technical description of a device pirated by a third-rate engineer, combined liberally with snippets of stuff they copy from competing websites and wikipedia. That’s usually how it works out, but I could be wrong.

But this is a separate issue from the observation that the application of low-frequency magnetic pulses usually has beneficial biological effects. No one really knows why, so marketers and profiteers take liberties to offer pseudo-scientific explanations to help distinguish their product from others.

I would guess their stuff probably has some amount of benefit, sometimes, for some people, but they really don’t know why. This is basically the truth for most electro-medical devices, especially those related to PEMF

4 Likes
#3

Assuming,“some benefit” beyond a placebo benefit?

#4

Without a controlled study or a well-designed observational study, it would be impossible to say.

#5

it really does come off as pseudoscience with assumptions of how things work. i am guilty of guessing to fill in the gaps myself for lack of real data :astonished:

#6

Making guesses and filling in gaps of knowledge is OK in my opinion, so long as you know that it is what you are doing. As a scientist, I make guesses all the time. Some work out, some do not. But I have problems with this when non-scientists present these guesses as scientific fact for marketing purposes.

1 Like